After months of revived debate over divorce and its increasing acceptance among Americans, a new study affirmed born again Christians are just as likely as the average American couple to divorce.
Painting by Jerome Lawrence
The nation has 165 seminaries, but 39 percent of seminary students attend just 20 of them. The 20 large institutions, all but two evangelical Christian, raise substantial money, have big endowments or receive moderate to high denominational support — or do all three. In the future, Mr. Aleshire said, “There may be just two kinds of seminaries, those with substantial endowments or effective annual giving and the nonexistent.”
Former Prime Minister Tony Blair, a new convert to the Roman Catholic Church, gave his first major speech on religion earlier this week. “For religion to be a force for good, it must be rescued not simply from extremism, faith as a means of exclusion; but also from irrelevance, an interesting part of our history but not of our future,” said Blair.
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Without the resurrection the Christian movement would have petered out in ignominy and there would have been no Christianity. Without the resurrection Christianity would not be itself, as the distinctiveness of Christianity is not its adherence to a teacher who lived long ago but its belief that “Jesus is Lord” for every generation through the centuries.
Since the first Earth Day, April 22, 1970, Earth Day has been an annual event for people around the world to celebrate the earth and renew our commitment to building a safer, healthier and cleaner world for all of us. It is a wonderful opportunity to embrace all of God’s creation, raise awareness and pray for “this fragile earth, our island home” (Eucharistic Prayer C, Book of Common Prayer). We have collected many resources and websites to facilitate the planning of education offerings and worship celebrations for this day.
Minto, Alaska, is home to about 180 people. While it’s situated less than 80 miles northwest of Fairbank as a bird flies, it takes nearly five hours to get there by car. As Christy McKerny of the Washington Post describes, accompanying the Rev. Bessie C. Titus on the drive to visit Minto’s new worship center was a breathtaking experience.
The host of Public Radio International’s Speaking of Faith found herself on the other side of the interviewer’s mike recently, in a profile on PBS’s Religion and Ethics Newsweekly. The show won a Peabody award this week, and the R&E piece took a closer look at what Krista Tippett allows might be “a ministry of listening rather than preaching”:
We remember King as “moral conscience of his nation,” “teacher of Christ-like non-violence,” “preacher of Christ’s love for neighbor,” and “champion of oppressed humanity.” We dare not let our politicians tame his memory, as he becomes part of the pantheon of civil religion, invoked with ease by leaders who stand against nearly everything he stood for. As hypocrites do when we invoke God, we honor King with our lips but not with changed lives.